1. Field of the Invention
The invention relates generally to the field of error correction apparatus and more particularly to Reed-Solomon error correction apparatus.
2. Brief Description of the Prior Art
Reed-Solomon error correction is known in the art. See E. Berlekamp, Algebraic Coding Theory (1968) at Chapter 10; Peterson and Weldon, Error Correcting Codes, 2nd ed. (1972); S. Lin, Error-Correcting Codes (1974); Key Papers in the Developing of Coding Theory (1974) (edited by E. Peterson); and Lin and Costello, Error Control Coding: Fundamentals and Applications (1983) at 278 and 531-2. See also such references as Chien et al., U.S. Pat. No. 4,142,174, filed Aug. 15, 1977, entitled High Speed Decoding of Reed Solomon Codes and Berlekamp U.S. Pat. No. 4,162,480, filed Jan. 28, 1977, entitled Galois Field Computer.
According to this art, Reed-Solomon error correcting apparatus have generally utilized a general purpose digital computer to control peripheral arithmetic units implementing Galois Field manipulation.
For large error-correction capability codes, such as a ten-error-correcting code, it is believed that an all hardware implementation of the necessary error correction algorithms would be too expensive. However, an all software implementation of the error correction algorithms would be too slow.